Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday December 04, 2010 @12:33PM
from the seems-like-a-cool-idea-to-me dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Last month, e-commerce marketplace Amazon.com launched a relatively unnoticed new feature that brings content from Wikipedia pages to its own servers in a shadowy new project that appears to be called 'Shopping Enabled Wikipedia Pages.' Hosted on the Amazon.com domain, they replicate Wikipedia's content but have added links to where a book can be purchased on Amazon. Amazon representative Anya Waring told CNET when asked via e-mail, 'As of November, we have rolled out in the books category, however [it] will be expanding to new categories in 2011.' If Average Joe scrapes Wikipedia and adds affiliate links to it, Google will remove and punish the domains with duplicate pages."

I guess there's nothing that doesn't end up being commercialized. Wikipedia has certain problems — when I look up topics in which I'm an expert, I always find the articles full of mistakes — but it was nice to see something that was relatively free of commercial spin. No more, it seems.

I doubt that, Wikipedia has thousands of revisions on even less important topics and mistakes get corrected out pretty quick, of course, if you find any 'mistakes' then perhaps you should try to fix them as any expert in any field should be doing..

..something that was relatively free of commercial spin

Amazon is not the first and certainly not the last entity that puts or mixes Wiki content with commercial stuff. Mostly these copycat&link sites get removed from the indexes and from the ad serving companies pretty quick. This case is different though, Amazon has little to worry about its PageRank being damaged and they do not derive their revenue from ads, that means they can misuse Wikipedia with little backslash.

Well I can only give my personal anecdote, but I think it stems from those that have decided "it shall be thus" and refusing to allow anything that affects their worldview, such as the article we had on/. recently that said when those that believe in a bias are confronted with evidence that goes against that bias it actually strengthens their belief in the bias instead of causing them to question it. Now my anecdote:

When I first heard of Wikipedia I thought it was a good idea, basically a FOSS encyclopedia, where crowd-sourcing could improve content and fix errors, so I thought I'd just read and if I ever found an error I'd do my part and fix it. I didn't actually go out looking for errors, just going about my normal business. Then I found an error. It wasn't a big error, in fact I personally thought it wasn't a big deal at all. It simply said a character in a show was supposed to be thus and end up with A, when I knew from watching the director's commentary that this was caused by executive meddling and both the writer and director wanted something completely different. so I pointed this out, linked to both the director's and writer's sites where they said the same thing...and was promptly banned and the page changed back to what it was. No reason given, or explanation why the director and writer were looked at as unreliable sources or whatever, just gone. Out of curiosity I started looking at the behind the scenes stuff like the talk boards and...wow. You are talking factions, rabid deletionists, and plenty with agendas, like the Scientologist that made sure anything nasty said about LRH got quickly shitcanned.

So I'd say anybody that uses Wikipedia for any information more exciting than the chemical weight of a mineral or which wires to switch to make a crossover cable are just asking for it. Once one becomes a mod on that site you are talking about serious factions, admins watching their "favorite" entries like a hawk and wiping anything they don't agree with, just look on their message boards and you'll find some serious abuses of power and mods that love the banhammer and use it quite often. You of course are welcome to believe what you like, but personally if Wikipedia told me the sky was blue I'd want a second opinion.

I doubt that, Wikipedia has thousands of revisions on even less important topics and mistakes get corrected out pretty quick, of course, if you find any 'mistakes' then perhaps you should try to fix them as any expert in any field should be doing..

I stopped editing Wikipedia in 2005 or so. I can go back to articles in my subject (linguistics) that I used to follow, and I find mistakes that are still left there half a decade later. There have been plenty of edits in the meantime, but they've never fixed specific factual errors.

And you'll find a lot of people disagree with your claim that fixing them is what "any experts in any field should be doing." My own specific branch of linguistics is tiny, it has a handful of experts. Several of them gave Wikipedia a try and then gave up on it pretty fast, as they felt that effecting any real beneficial change was impossible when you have cabals of non-expert editors. Besides, there's an occasional feeling in my field that our research doesn't really concern the public; it benefits them indirectly, but reaching out to the layman ourselves is a waste of time. Experts have a duty to do expert research, not writing popular science.

My own specific branch of linguistics is tiny, it has a handful of experts. Several of them gave Wikipedia a try and then gave up on it pretty fast, as they felt that effecting any real beneficial change was impossible when you have cabals of non-expert editors.

Unfortunately, what you say is true. Wikipedia should only be trusted for things known by enough people. (What's "enough"? That's the question, isn't it...) I've heard the same information from every person I know that has truly expert knowledge on a

A lot of experts have a problem with having no authority on Wikipedia and having to cite sources like anyone else.

Actually, a lot of experts in a field may be coming up with original research in the field, and thus have no authority to comment in the wikipedia article as no original research [wikipedia.org] is permitted.

I stopped editing Wikipedia in 2005 or so. I can go back to articles in my subject (linguistics) that I used to follow, and I find mistakes that are still left there half a decade later. There have been plenty of edits in the meantime, but they've never fixed specific factual errors.

I really don't get it, why not just fixed those factual errors?? It sounds like you saw those errors in wikipedia in 2005 and never bothered to do anything with it other than acknowledge something is wrong. Then, recently, you read the same article and again noticed the same error you registered in 2005 but complain about it? When you say "they've never fixed" you do realize you are really saying I never fixed it right? Because "they" is "you"!

I doubt that, Wikipedia has thousands of revisions on even less important topics and mistakes get corrected out pretty quick, of course, if you find any 'mistakes' then perhaps you should try to fix them as any expert in any field should be doing..

I can certainly vouch for the GP's sentiment in my own area of expertise. I actually use Wikipedia primarily as a tool for finding out what kinds of misinformation there are floating around in the wild; it's a useful gauge of what misinformation is popularly perceived to be "true".

Experts have much better things to do than edit Wikipedia; it's abundantly clear that all editing is controlled by people with vested interests who use opaque processes to silence dissent. Experts do have a responsibility to write popular science, targetted at educated non-specialists. However, there's absolutely no point doing so in a venue that will invariably introduce errors after it's been written.

I highly recommend Citizendum. It was created Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia. (He was disappointed with it too.) People use real-world names, and real world credentials there. Articles are peer reviewed before published. Of course being more selective means there're less articles.

Do you know of a good alternative? I agree, the pages related to my field are horrible and at looking at the discussions, practically uncorrectable [...] I do appreciate what is there though, particularly for subjects that other resources would neglect.

Well, there's always a trade-off between expertise and general coverage. So when choosing what to devote my efforts to, I'll go for more specialised venues, basically.

For academic subjects, a partial solution in print/e-book format is specialised, ad hoc encyclopaedias with references (so NOT like the Britannica, which is a horribly awful example of an encyclopaedia in almost every way). Still better is the current trend for "companions", i.e. volumes on a specific topic with entire in-depth chapters on sub

perhaps you should try to fix them as any expert in any field should be doing

Experts who are members of the Wikipedia Fraternity, perhaps. Of which there are decidedly few, unless their expertise is in Nerd Culture Politics. Legitimate experts, no matter how well-intentioned, inevitably have better things to do than fight the in-grained biases and deletionism.

if you find any 'mistakes' then perhaps you should try to fix them as any expert in any field should be doing..

I used to, but I got tired of making the same corrections over and over again.

If I publish an article or book or even my own blog, I can set down what I believe to be true and people can consult it or cite if they accept my authority; they can also dispute my statements or just ignore me if they choose to. But with Wikipedia, everything I say is written in the sand at low tide.

All this is off-topic to the main point of the news item, of course, but it's a second thing (besides Amazon pseudo-ads) that so

Wikipedia has whole areas of distinct, anti-factual bias, medicine and climate being two large examples where conventional wisdom, and so-called consensus science, ride roughshod over inconvenient hard science and simple facts.

Perhaps it would be better to put the article in a blog posting and show its errors. Make sure you explain why you're qualified as an expert and try to give us references to other resources that contradict the Wikipedia article.

Shame the wikipedia cabal publicly, and perhaps they might fix their article. Even if they don't, if your blog shows up in google, then those of us researching the topic might see your corrections.

Wikipedia will be the first encyclopedia to have a version which actually directly pushes readers to more authoritative sources (specialized books, etc.) How many other encyclopedias will be able to say that they have such integration?

Wikipedia will be the first encyclopedia to have a version which actually directly pushes readers to more authoritative sources (specialized books, etc.) How many other encyclopedias will be able to say that they have such integration?

Wikipedia has always had the ability to look up where to get books that are cited as references [wikipedia.org]. People tend to cite online sources more often because it is easier, and because the admins prefer references that they can check without having to do much work; I've seen arguments where admin threatened to remove something because the reference was an (unclassified) military manual which was only available in large libraries.

If you click on an ISBN you'll get this unweildy page [wikipedia.org], which links to searches in more

What's this I don't think you are reading it right. Wikipedia has done nothing, this is a unilateral action from Amazon, an action that will fail because it depends on people visiting Amazon to read Wikipedia, I guess they are hoping business partners will link to their version of Wikipedia rather than the free one but I doubt it will have any traction.

Wikipedia might not be perfect but if you read those articles full of mistakes with that awesome reading skills of yours, I think Wikipedia is doing just fin

Wikipedia has certain problems -- when I look up topics in which I'm an expert, I always find the articles full of mistakes -- but it was nice to see something that was relatively free of commercial spin.

I wish more people would do this. I think people rarely look up pages in which they are expert, or have good knowledge of. I have found errors, misrepresentations or bad explanations in most pages I've looked at, where I am knowledgeable in the subject. This leads me to the reasonable conclusion that ther

Importantly also, almost all Movie pages, for example, have content that's clearly stolen directly from IMdB.

At least in the United States, you can't "steal" factual information about movies. As for IMDb, I have no sympathy for them, since they got a lot of work for free from people under the guise of a community project, which was then sold for a profit to Amazon.

I guess there's nothing that doesn't end up being commercialized. Wikipedia has certain problems — when I look up topics in which I'm an expert, I always find the articles full of mistakes — but it was nice to see something that was relatively free of commercial spin. No more, it seems.

Wiki is still there without going through Amazon. For those subjects with mistakes, there's Google's Knol [google.com] which only publishes articles by experts.

Am I missing something? This "enriched content" is not hosted by wikipedia, it's hosted by Amazon. So if you want something free of commercial spin, keep using Wikipedia -- and don't use the Amazon copy of it.

I had a certain large chinese search engine go haywire on one of my websites quite a while back. a disallow in robots.txt didn't seem to do the trick, so instead of flat blocking them I redirected hits from their IP range/UA string to their own search results and the problems with their bot ceased almost immediately.

In a commercial relationship, for anything to be valued, it must not then just be assigned monetary equivalence. Indeed, that token monetary assignment becomes the most significant evaluation of a thing, to the exclusion and actual detriment of its other possibilities, qualities and merits.

This is what is meant by the expression "degradation of the marketplace."

No, they've taken a local copy, they're not hot-loading. WMF was not consulted in any way before they did this, and I believe the only outstanding issue is the perception that WMF has anything to do with this. But I'm sure this will be straightened out in short order.

Because if there's one thing Wikipedia hates, it's people actually using it's articles.
But that's beside the point because they're using an archived version hosted on their own servers, which is why the featured article and such don't match.

No, they don't. Wikipedia will not be getting a SINGLE DOLLAR out of this, and this is almost certainly not something that was decided by any of the wikipedia administrators.

Aww, don't be so cynical. Not a single dollar? Do you know what Wikipedia's biggest expense is? Serving their pages. It's a burden for them.

Answers.com, Amazon and a bunch of other sites host mirrors of Wikipedia for free, in exchange for putting some of their own ads on it. Wikipedia serves their information to more people, while serving less traffic directly.

Google punishes wikipedia clones with adverts? Are you sure, because one of the things that made me stop using Google was the large number of results that were either mailing list archives with ads (the same list post on the top 10 hits, just different ads), or Wikipedia copies with ads. In fact, the 'Google will remove and punish' link refers to domains that contain the same content on different pages, rather than domains that duplicate the content of other domains, so is completely inapplicable to pages hosting Wikipedia content plus adverts.

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.

Google will discount the PageRank (Page, as in Larry) to nothing for prior published content. That is the one and only "penalty."

Amazon, whatever the value of this, has enough related value content for this not to matter much-- there's (probably) a PR+ value to presenting the relevant Wikipedia content next to similar information.

Yes, it's darn annoying and another reason to boycott those **** at Amazon. But it's not the things the OP summary says.//karma-whoring

That's what Wikipedia gets for using a not-restrictive-enough Creative Commons license: Amazon has now figured out how to monetize Wikipedia and make money from the unpaid efforts of other people. Wikipedia should have used a license that specifically denied that sort of "capitalization".

Let's play this game. Assume Wikipedia was using a more draconian licence that restricted monetary gain. Then it would become a much less valuable as source material. If I was working on a research grant, I couldn't touch wikipedia, not even to check their sources, out of fear of getting sued for copyright violations. Do we really want more of that?

Your example is silly, a non sequitur: nothing in such a license would prohibit READING Wikipedia... which is all you'd be doing if you were "checking sources". If you COPIED the article into your own research-for-profit, though, you'd be begging for a smackdown.

Let's play this game. Assume Wikipedia was using a more draconian licence that restricted monetary gain. Then it would become a much less valuable as source material. If I was working on a research grant, I couldn't touch wikipedia, not even to check their sources, out of fear of getting sued for copyright violations. Do we really want more of that?

If I was working on a research grant, I couldn't touch wikipedia *anyway*. It *might* be an OK source for grade / high-school and *some* undergrad papers / projects, but NOT for research grants.

Wikipedia is a great resource, but not for anything more than a very preliminary starting point for things above a certain level.

If I was working on a research grant, I couldn't touch wikipedia *anyway*. It *might* be an OK source for grade / high-school and *some* undergrad papers / projects, but NOT for research grants.

Wikipedia shouldn't be cited as a source at any level. But it can help you to understand a topic, and hopefully point you to some better sources if you need to cite something. There's no arbitrary limit at which you can't use it like that. Even when you're an expert in some field, you're still going to want information on related fields quite often.

Assume Wikipedia was using a more draconian license that restricted monetary gain. Then it would become a much less valuable as source material.

That's nonsense, Wikipedia's license applies to redistribution, not use. You would have as much freedom with Wikipedia using non-commercial license as with any regular old book, you could use and quote it all you like, just not do plain verbatim copies of it. Or have you stopped using regular books to while working on your research grants too?

Do we really want more of that?

Depends, once up on a time there was some use for allowing commercial redistribution of freely licensed stuff, as otherwise you wouldn't have all the Linux distributio

Are they redirecting people from wikipedia? Are they stomping on search result pages? Nothing is being "shoved" here.

This is an incredibly useful feature. I use wikipedia all the time for research papaers, but most research papers do not allow online sources or allow only a limited number. Citations to actual books are needed, and to draw quotes from those books we need access to at least a bit of the content. Amazon provides this, meaning now I may be able to just click a citation and be directed to the proper page at amazon where I can access a few sample pages from the book - ba-bing, now I have a citation for my paper. What's amazing is not how amazon was crass enough to do this, but that jimmy wales was so shortsighted as to not offer to do this from the beginning. That's potentially a lot of revenue they'll never claim now.

Citations to actual books are needed, and to draw quotes from those books we need access to at least a bit of the content. Amazon provides this, meaning now I may be able to just click a citation and be directed to the proper page at amazon where I can access a few sample pages from the book - ba-bing, now I have a citation for my paper.

So, you think research is just "accessing a few sample pages" and then linking to that.

Research? Who said anything about research? I was talking about completing papers for class. And it doesn't matter what I think or don't think about completing a classroom assignment - my grades speak for themselves. So far I see little difference in the pages anyway. It's just sad Wales didn't think to tap that mine before Amazon jumped his claim.

Research? Who said anything about research? I was talking about completing papers for class. And it doesn't matter what I think or don't think about completing a classroom assignment - my grades speak for themselves. So far I see little difference in the pages anyway. It's just sad Wales didn't think to tap that mine before Amazon jumped his claim.

I think you're confusing "original research" with the type of research you do to complete assignments. In essence, by doing what you are saying the grades don't have to speak for themselves. It isn't a matter of doing well on assignments, it is how you complete the assignment. There's nothing really scholarly in what you are doing, which was ColdWetDog's point.

To understand (which you are clearly too young to understand), imagine a world without the internet or wikipedia. You would not be able to do a

Why on earth should "Wikipedia" (I assume you meant the Wikimedia Foundation) make any money off anything? That whole organization exists to enrich themselves (I'm referring to everyone who draws a salary from WMF) from the work of the actual contributors(normal people who write the content), none of whom are paid for their trouble.

When I read the summary, I thought it was referring to the delightful(ly stupid) practice some people have got into, of packaging Wikipedia pages and selling them on Amazon while printing the things through services like Lulu. That was a clear example of how badly their internal search can be gamed. This is just unbelievably crass. On the other hand, who on Earth is going to go straight to an Amazon mirror of Wikipedia?

Somebody who wants the services that the mirror offers - eg the ability to purchase source materials directly from the article itself. There have been times I've come across book references in Wikipedia that I wanted to purchase (or check price).; or have seen references to an actual product that I want to get.

It appears that you have to find a way to click yourself out of shopping-enabled Wikipedia into regular Wikipedia in order to be able to search Wikipedia for anything that's not already on the main page.

Also, the shopping-enabled main page is under the impression that today is October 23. When you live near a Marine Corps base, stuff like

1983 – Lebanese Civil War: Suicide bombers destroyed two barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 French paratroopers of the international peacekeeping force.

I hope they'll be kicking back some money to the Wikimedia Foundation. Though they don't have to, if they're getting some value out of it, they should make sure Wikimedia can keep its projects running. Bezos can certainly spare some change.

I'd guess that this is mostly about enhancing things for Kindle users. Perhaps when reading a Kindle book there'll be an embedded link to the Amazon enhanced Wiki content. Same for Shelfari, Abebooks, etc. They may have no intention of making the Wiki content available to casual surfers, and may opt-out of indexing by search engines entirely.

Yes, efreedom are bad people. It looks like they popped up right after the last time Google rejiggered their algorithm (or at least around an announced/confirmed change), but who knows how long they've been around and whether their prominence is due to new science or a lucky SEO windfall finally rewarding them for something they'd been doing for some time (lurking at the 50th SERP. They have been falling off my searches somewhat since then.

I might get bashed for this comment but I think that it is actually a good feature. As a researcher, I often use Wikipedia to get links to more more sources of authority that I can ask the laboratory to order on Amazon. As far as I understand, at the moment, Amazon just links ISBN and book titles back to Amazon so you can buy them. What I did before was copy and pasting the ISBN to Amazon or searching for the book title.
The way they have implemented the shopping-enabled Wikipedia is close to the behaviour of customers looking for books on a specific subject and just spare some copy-paste. If I use wikipedia to get to know how I should spend my book budget, I think this is a very good approach.

I agree with you on that. Plus it should be a feature Wikipedia benefits from. They should receive a fee for any redirect or any book sold that way. But to be fair Wikipedia should offer an API to any booksellers to do this. A feature that would help customers choosing their bookseller.

1) a person browses Wikipedia (the portal of knowledge)2) she finds an interesting book referred from Wikipedia3) chooses her bookseller to buy the book (the deposit of knowledge)4) ???5) profit !;-)

Is it just me or have they removed the ability to search articles? So far, it appears to show me the main page by default and I can't freely choose an article. I don't see any adds and links to Amazon content only seem to work with ISBNs. As is, it's pretty useless.

1) If the data is a copy, how do you keep the copy synced with the original.

2) If the data is a hot-link, who pays for the extra bandwidth?

Those are both minor, and only one will apply. But to me it seems that there should probably be an update cycle. The main question is "how fast?". If it's a slow update cycle, then there should be little on-going expense, and it should facilitate Wikipedia doing it's job.

The extra bandwidth that I was talking about was that bandwidth used by Amazon in making the periodic backup copy. Which happens repeatedly. The frequency with which it happens determines the amount of extra bandwidth.